The Most Talked-About Philosopher

Published: June 2, 1991

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The main problem with this idea is that not even Mr. Rorty himself can stay faithful to it. By his own lights, he ought to argue not that pragmatism is right but that it is useful. In fact, for the most part he uses good old-fashioned philosophical arguments to support it. It is hardly surprising that he seldom gives reasons for believing that pragmatism is somehow more helpful than its alternatives, since that is a most implausible claim. Science has been pretty successful even though most, if not all, of its major practitioners have taken themselves to be describing the world. How can Mr. Rorty be so sure that it would be even more successful if they dropped this idea?

And how does he propose to prevent the conversation of mankind from degenerating into the blathering of mankind? The Rortyan vision of heaven on earth, in which people merely tell enlightening tales and abjure the search for truth, sounds like a gathering of tipsy old sea dogs swapping dimly remembered stories of past voyages of discovery. If the earlier explorers had all been Rortyan pragmatists, the sea dogs would have had nothing to reminisce about. Fortunately, Mr. Rorty is, despite himself, one of the old-fashioned explorers for much of the time. Just as "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" had plenty of old-style analytical philosophy to keep its readers happy while they read their own obituaries, so these essays are rich in old-fashioned argumentative criticism to brighten the longueurs of Rortyan "conversation." In one of several essays on Jacques Derrida, Mr. Rorty agrees with John Searle that many of Mr. Derrida's arguments are "awful" and he does a good job of showing why. Mr. Derrida still seems to be one of his flawed heroes, though, and Mr. Rorty soon directs the higher dismissiveness at Mr. Searle in order to prevent analytical philosophy from winning too much of a victory.

Mr. Rorty's range is impressively wide: the heroes discussed amount to a parade more diverse than any other philosophical writer is inclined to muster -- Dewey, Heidegger, Paul de Man, W. V. O. Quine, Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault, Mr. Davidson, Mr. Derrida, Hilary Putnam. This is one reason why he is worth reading.

The other main reason is deeper. There is a family of ideas that forms a nebulous backdrop to much contemporary intellectual chat. It might broadly be termed relativism. Its central theme is that objectivity is a myth; each picture of reality is a product of personal or social factors, and although such pictures can be compared with one another, they cannot be compared with the world itself. There is one sense in which this is trivially true: human theories about the world are indeed expressed in concepts invented by people. But there is another sense in which it is highly questionable: our theories are not, on the whole, about concepts, they are about things, so it simply does not follow that the truth of these theories is similarly invented by people. Although "relativist" is one of the few labels Mr. Rorty rejects, his writings take one strand of relativism to its logical extreme, and thus admirably reveal its strengths and weaknesses.

It is a nice irony, which he would probably not appreciate, that it is Mr. Rorty himself who in the end tries to ascend to a "God's-eye view." He seems to think he can revolutionize and dissolve traditional philosophical problems, such as that of the relation between mind and body or the problem of answering skepticism, merely by announcing that the concepts giving rise to them are outdated. No doubt one day they will be. But the success orthodox philosophers still have in clarifying the problems, and in demonstrating how most quick attempts at their dissolution fail, shows that the day has not come. Mr. Rorty's approach -- and the higher dismissiveness in general -- is rather like trying to write a history of events that have not yet been played out. You cannot effect a revolution merely by proclaiming that you are a revolutionary.